Each Modern is delighted to announce that Shohei Takasaki: Looking at Debris Sideways will be held from 2 January 2024. The title of the exhibition itself suggests a unique perspective, a sideways glance at the often overlooked or discarded.
In creating the pieces for this exhibition, Takasaki drew inspiration from a wide range of sources spanning diverse eras and categories. The importance of art history took a secondary role; rather, the emphasis was placed on the purely visual fulfillment that these references provided. By divorcing them from their contexts and stories, Takasaki purified his interaction with these images to one of aesthetic engagement only, in an attempt to bypass calculated intellectual processes and connect with the instinctive drive within himself. Though the idea of referencing images without considering their context and history could be dangerous or disrespectful, Takasaki remains keenly aware of positionality in art history– indeed, this is perhaps what allows him to transcend it. The appeal of his works lies in his ability to extract the very energy of art historical transitions and revolutions and channel them through his own hand. This unpredictability is a symptom of his receptivity, to the past and also to the present: he also drew inspiration from everyday stimuli such as random fragments of photographs discarded on his studio floor, paper towels dirtied with random abstract marks, doodles on the wall drawn by his son, scribbles from idle moments on the phone, and the sight of people running through a hailstorm outside his studio window. These mundane objects and moments– these "scattered debris" which get buried under the rubble of everyday life— were collected from his conscious and subconscious and repurposed into catalysts for his creative process.
Takasaki characterizes his work as an extension of the automatist tradition. Although practicing automatism as a person living actively in society and in relation to those around us may be anarchic and possibly dangerous, the artist asserts that the discovery of " unconscious" strokes and compositions that come from outside one's own personality, hobbies, tendencies, and habits is a special experience that is incomparable to anything else, since it involves a deep immersion into one's unconscious akin to returning from a human to an animal, to a "living being". This act runs counter to the direction which we are heading in today, in 2024. The more our society shuns our animalistic and intuitive expressions and tends toward structure, calculation, and planning, the more radical automatism becomes. Ironically enough, however, our technological information society could potentially push automatism further, since it allows our spirits to connect with countless individuals anywhere, even beyond Earth, while our physical selves remain stationary. This is why Takasaki does not confine himself to one technique, but rather eclectically "collages" various visual elements into a single artwork, regardless of their context. Citing the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia, whose diverse career was associated with Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism at various points in his life, Takasaki similarly seeks to create works that freely defy genre and continue to evolve unhindered by categories.
In striving for personal gratification instead of the purposeful invention of a novel style, Takasaki follows his gut instinct to interact with the entire world around him as a source of latent creative power. Through this exhibition, he invites viewers to take a look at debris sideways, to see the world from a fresh perspective.
Press release courtesy Each Modern.
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